It’s worth pointing out that demonetization is nearly as bad as an outright ban, as it demoralizes creators, and in some cases, cuts off their main source of income. Relying on Patreon or Subscribestars (a recent and less PC Russian alternative) is a bandaid – while we greatly appreciate the exceptions, anonymous readers are rarely very generous, and you need to be really big to make even a decent living off public donations. And they can always shut you down as well. Patreon is more than happy to kick controversial people off by itself, while Subscribestars had to cease operations for a period of time after PayPal cut them off.

weird how you and your alt-lite grifter buddies ignored censorship when it was happening to Andrew Anglin, Richard Spencer et al. two years ago, it's almost like you're full of shit https://t.co/7Er8PE6NU5

Online hate & extremism pose a significant threat. We were glad to share our expertise with @YouTube on updating their policies to keep #hate off their platform. This is an important step forward, but must be followed by many more. Read our full statement: https://t.co/4UFLycS891

(4) I have a blog post ready to go about how the vlogosphere has superseded the old blogosphere over the past few years. Obviously, it will now have to be substantially rewritten.

But the main point to take from here is that YouTube is not going to become the center of anti-Establishment dissidence that we thought it might be, just as similar delusions about the power of Twitter and other social media were dispelled from around 2017*.

First, they are much smaller than YouTube, which is a de facto monopolist in this sphere, and so derives vast benefits from network effects.

Second, YouTube operates on an annual loss of a billion dollars. It is something that Alphabet subsidizes for presumably political reasons. No other site can afford to be a YouTube. Videos take up a lot of storage space, and HDD’s don’t come free!

Third, let’s be honest, many of the people driven off are not so much dissidents as assorted freaks and weirdos. Their presence will deter “normies” from migrating over. We already have a perfect example of that with Gab (Twitter alternative) and Voat (Reddit alternative).

Apparently, creating and implementing vague, arbitrary censorship standards on the fly in response to mob demands and then purging people en masse end up suppressing and punishing many voices that censorship advocates like. Who could have guessed this would happen? https://t.co/QQjUKR082h

Moreover, apart from institutionalizing blank slatism, YouTube is also committing to fighting “falsehoods” such as 9/11 or Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. While I do not buy into those two in particular, imagine if YouTube had existed in the 1960s, and it censored “conspiracy theories” portraying the Gulf of Tonkin incident as the “false flag” it turned out to be. And we don’t even have to look decades back. The Saudis are clearly going out of the way building a case for war with Iran, with those ridiculous “Iranian attacks” on their oil tankers. Fortunately, false flagging is an O-Ring task, and Saudis are apparently too low IQ to accomplish that. And half of the US political elites don’t have it out for Iran anyway, so there is institutional resistance.

But what if there were similar attempts to false flag a war with Russia? Or with China, whose demonization has also become increasingly bipartisan? The inability to debunk false flags – or rather, to have it catch fire – may well result in avoidable wars.

(7) Prediction: The last dissident resources in the West to remain standing will be technically adept websites financed by moneyed individuals or groups (such as The Unz Review), or true cyberpunk “samizdat” outfits lurking in the deep web and kept afloat with crypto donations (such as The Daily Stormer).

Ironically, Susan Wojcicki, the censorious CEO of Youtube, is the sister of Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andMe, a Race Science DNA testing firm that blasphemes daily against the Race Does Not Exist creed. Susan was Sergey Brin's landlord and Anne his wife.https://t.co/kEowIXFVZY

(8) There is no reason for repression not to increase just as concrete genomic evidence of group differences in personality traits starts getting published on a large scale. Historically, it is often at precisely such moments of stress that repression is maximized. It also serves the elite’s interests, as spandrell has pointed out in a recent blog post. Nothing undermines their high status more than HBD, because it suggests that their success is achieved through genetic privilege, as opposed to their own hard work and moral superiority.

To end this on a futurist cyberpunk note, it will also very conveniently make it easier for them to ban genomic augmentation of intelligence and other desirable traits e.g. for social justice reasons, while many of them quietly make use of such “black clinics” in less regulated Third World countries.

(9) The one happy thing about all this is that more and more restrictions and censorship means higher quality output.

First, it weeds out the grifters – no point to grifting when you are blacklisted and deplatformed from everything.

Second, it may also impose a certain discipline on content producers, forcing them to pick their words with care while making the same points they used to. Note that most of the greatest “subversive” literature was produced in moderately repressive ancien regimes, not democratic republics with strong freedoms of speech. When everything has been banned, the novels of Houellebecq, for instance, may have that much more weight and resonance.